'David Cameron is clearly a Conservative, yet lots of his MPs do not think he is one of them.' Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA

I wonder how the pre-government David Cameron would have reacted if he had been told about the future course of his leadership. As he visited council estates, addressed trade union conferences and wooed non-Tory newspapers, how would he have responded to news that 27 Anglican bishops would attack his government over the numbers facing hunger? The young leader who seemed to want to move his party on from the 1980s is now the prime minister, facing a very loud echo of the Faith in the City report, published in that angry, fear-fuelled decade.

The answer I suspect is that the youthful leader would have been only half surprised and alarmed. The other half would not have been remotely taken aback. The beginnings determine the course a leader will take. There are no fundamental surprises that follow the early days. Anyone who observed Thatcher closely in the 70s would not have been amazed to discover that she became a prime minister on the radical right, or that her fall involved cabinet colleagues wielding knives. As opposition leader she had declared provocatively she would brook no dissent, and argued that the state was the problem and never part of any potential solution. The seeds were sown.

Cameron's early approach was shallow, perhaps not surprisingly for a leader with such limited experience of the political stage. Strategically, he and his advisers sought to copy the New Labour rulebook. It was uniquely imitative. Most parties lift some weapons from a successful competitor but not the whole armoury.

Blair wooed Murdoch. Cameron wooed the Guardian and the Independent. Blair spoke to business leaders and reassured them. Cameron addressed trade union leaders about the quality of life and what government could do improve it. Blair stressed the need for spending limits and tax cuts. Cameron attacked the Labour government for not spending enough. Blair said his priority was education, education, education. Cameron declared his could be summed up in three letters: NHS. Blair was an aspiring prime minister who wore blue denim shirts on holiday. Cameron was an aspiring PM who wore blue denim shirts on holiday. Blair sought defectors from other parties. Cameron ached for one.

The PM has never succeeded in attracting a defector. This is a clue as to why the younger Cameron would not be wholly surprised by his present-day self. Defectors are a reliable symptom of big waves erupting around the political landscape. But there were no big waves. The young Cameron's policies, in contrast to his strategic objectives, were Thatcherite. When focusing on policy rather than strategy or tone there was no attempt to disguise this. One of his closest aides told me that their programme was "reheated Thatcherism". Another said the Tories' purpose was to complete what she had started. The "big society" was wholly in line with her beliefs, implying a smaller state with charities or indeed churches stepping in to deliver. Iain Duncan Smith made clear the scale of his ambition in relation to welfare policy. Andrew Lansley issued a detailed document on his NHS shakeup. Having affected support for Labour's spending plans, Cameron and George Osborne leapt at the chance of returning to their ideological comfort zone when the financial crash happened in 2008. Nothing was hidden in policy terms, which is why the younger Cameron would have almost expected church leaders to erupt in anger as he continued the Thatcher crusade.

The problem with having a centrist strategy that contradicts the policy objectives is that very few are fully won over. Cameron is clearly a Conservative, yet lots of his MPs do not think he is one of them. Even one of the more perceptive veterans, Norman Lamont, once told me he was worried that the new leader was not actually a Tory any more. Lamont was following the tone and strategy, rather than the policies.

But on the non-Thatcherite side of the spectrum the policies and their impact are noted, which is why church leaders felt compelled to speak out. Even Nick Clegg, who genuinely believed that Cameron was a different type of Conservative in 2010, looked sincerely troubled when he told me this week in a BBC interview that he was surprised at how rightwing the Conservatives had become.

Cameron's response to an earlier onslaught from the Catholic archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, was typical. In an article he was tonally emollient, acknowledging the right of religious leaders to speak out. Yet in terms of the policies he was unyielding. It is quite something for a Tory prime minister to alienate the top church leaders in the land and yet still be regarded by some Tory MPs as a leftie. The seeds were sown at the beginning and the signs were there. They always are.

Patrick Butler: Churches are taking apart the coalition's increasingly threadbare moral arguments on welfare reforms and providing evidence that poor people are going hungry as a direct result of its policies